It’s a question that I hear over and over from business people of all stripes. As I was preparing for a recent speaking engagement, I came across this video where Seth Godin responds to that very question.

During a panel discussion on digital marketing, someone from the audience asked Seth Godin if Social Networking was valuable for business. Here’s what he said:

“Do you measure success by the number of Facebook Friends you have? I hope not.

Most of your Facebook friends are not really your friends. They’re probably there because they didn’t want to offend you by pressing the ignore button. You haven’t seen or actually spoken to them in the 20 years since you graduated from high school.

If you’ve got 5,000 people following you on Twitter because you tell a joke every couple of hours that’s not particularly useful for your business either.

The internet is this giant networking event with all these people swarming around connecting as much as they can because they’re keeping score. Who likes me today, who’s talking about me today. But one day when you need to sign on a new client because you don’t know how you’re going to make payroll in November those scores don’t matter. What matters are the real relationships.

You can have real relationships with people you’ve never met when you’ve done things for each other, when you’ve exchanged worthwhile idea, when you’ve been connected by real things.

Networking is always important when it’s real and it’s always a useless distraction when it’s fake.

The internet has allowed an enormous amount of fake networking to take place. It’s so easy to be seduced by it because there’s a dashboard; a scoreboard that says look how popular I am … and its nonsense.

What translates is there are people out there who I would go out of my way for and who would go out of their way for me. That’s what you need to keep track of and the way to get there is to go out of your way for them and by earning the privilege of one day having that connection.”

“Networking is always important when it’s real and it’s always a useless distraction when it’s fake.”

Remember that point.

Are you making real connections through your Social Media efforts? In my opinion, taking the connections that you make online into the offline world is the most important and profitable use of Social Media.

Question(s): What real connections are you making online? Are you turning those connections into offline relationships?